Inception
by Grac3
Summary: Set in the Malfoy Manor scene of Deathly Hallows. When Draco is forced to prove Harry's identity, he attempts to use Legilimency on Harry and Harry wishes that he was better at Occlumency. But Draco isn't trying to take something out of Harry's mind, he's trying to put something in. Could be considered pre-slash.


**Disclaimer: Don't own Harry Potter**

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Lucius shoved Draco down before Harry, but Harry's vision was so blurred from the Stinging Hex that the two Death Eaters only appeared to him as blond blurs. He couldn't help but feel that this was it: if Draco recognised him – which he undoubtedly would – then all of their travelling, all of their efforts to find the Horcruxes, all those months of sleeping in tents, will have been for nothing. They had yet to destroy all of Voldemort's Horcruxes, and until they had, it would be useless to face the shadow of a man himself. Harry could only hope that Hermione's spellwork would make him sufficiently unrecognisable.

Draco's eyes flicked to the scar on his forehead, and Harry felt his heart drop. No Stinging Hex – not even one cast by the most powerful witch of her age – could distort the lightning bolt on his forehead to the extent that someone who had spent six years in close proximity to it would not know it instantly.

Yet as he watched the familiar grey eyes return to his disfigured face, Harry could see within the orbs reluctance, fear.

Draco was scared.

Harry frowned. What did Draco have to be afraid of? He had the chance to hand Harry Potter over to Lord Voldemort, to be forgiven for his cowardice the previous year, to be rewarded beyond his wildest dreams…

Grey met green, and suddenly the external world disappeared, seemingly dissolving around Harry's ears. Bellatrix was speaking, but as Harry became detached from the world outside his head, her voice became increasingly muffled, sounding farther and farther away.

It was only when reality shifted completely that Harry realised with a sickening feeling what Draco was trying to do. As memories of being chased up trees by dogs and locked in the cupboard under the stairs for hours on end resurfaced and danced in his field of vision, Harry only wished that he was better at Occlumency. Hermione had been right: he should have practiced; he should have been practicing since the night Mad-Eye had died and he had seen Voldemort torturing Ollivander through the Dark Lord's own eyes, and now not only was he going to be delivered to Voldemort before he was ready to fight him, but the Dark Lord would be in possession of all of his worst memories with which to torment him, handed to him on a silver plate by the one Death Eater whom he felt had failed him worst of all…

Before he could resign himself to this, however, the memories that had been pulled from the depths of his consciousness began to sliver away, and he was once again faced with Draco's grey irises boring into his own. The scene did not last long, though, for a new one began to take its place. Soon, he was inside a grand hall, similar in architecture to the Entrance Hall at Hogwarts but made of pearl white marble instead of dark stone. This was not a place that he had ever been before; he did not remember visiting it, and it was too impressive a place for it to be easily forgotten.

"Potter."

Harry started; he had thought that he was alone, perhaps having passed out and dreaming that he was in this place. But there was someone else in this strange place, and the one who had spoken sounded both completely terrified, and exactly like Draco Malfoy.

When Harry blinked, an image of Draco appeared before him, with that same look of reluctant fear present in his eyes that Harry had seen in Malfoy Manor.

It was then that he realised that he was, in fact, still in Malfoy Manor, and that the Death Eater was still using Legilimency on him – but he wasn't trying to take memories out of his head for use in whatever horrible method he could think of: he was trying to put things in. Yet it was clear that whatever he was attempting to show him, it was not a memory: Draco was manipulating the magic of Legilimency to open a kind of telepathic channel of communication between them.

Draco took a step closer to Harry, and instantly Harry could see what he hadn't bothered to notice before: Draco looked _awful_. His skin was grey, his eyes bloodshot and wide with fear, his hair thin and greasy. Draco grabbed his shoulders and shook him slightly, as though trying to get his attention – as though he didn't have it already.

And then he said the two words that made Harry's heart break for Draco in spite of himself; that showed him Draco for who he really was: a scared boy who just wanted to do what was right, undo his wrongs and earn forgiveness and salvation:

"Help me."

As soon as the words were spoken, the connection was broken, and Harry found himself only half-listening as Draco denied knowing for sure that the boy knelt before him was Harry Potter. As he was dragged to the dungeons of Malfoy Manor, those two terrified syllables were rattling around in Harry's head, the most honest thing that he had ever heard Malfoy say.

_Help me, help me, help me, help me…_


End file.
